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I noticed a difference in the fan settings. My 4890 used to idle at about 43 degrees C, and the fan would kick back and forth between 0% and 50% as it kept crossing the threshold between the two settings. On for two seconds off for two seconds, rinse and repeat. You could barely hear it, but it was loud enough to distract me. That was annoying. Now it runs in the upper 40s C and hovers in the upper 30% range for fan speed, and I can't hear it anymore. That makes me happy, baring any other issues I should come across. Reply

I installed the 9.12 hotfix on Vista x64, but the version number still says 9.11, both in the Catalyst control panel and in Device Manager.
The driver date is 12/14/1009 though. OpenCL also appears to be GPU-accelerated. The 'terse' version number is also 8.682.2.0.
So it looks like the drivers installed properly, they just aren't labeled 9.12.

Now I wonder what these drivers are. Are they really 9.12 drivers with additional fixes? In which case, why is the driver version at 9.11 then?
Or is this 9.11 with some experimental code (earlier OpenCL betas were also labeled 9.11), so it doesn't contain the other 9.12 fixes and performance upgrades? Reply

Yea, it's a bit strange though.
I tried installing the regular 9.12 drivers, but that didn't seem to work after installing the hotfix (I suppose it didn't overwrite some of the files because they were newer).
So I uninstalled all drivers, then reinstalled regular 9.12... Then my version appeared as 9.12... And then I installed the hotfix drivers again, and now it's still reading 9.12.

I just hope that next month's regular release will finally have official OpenCL support.

I'm not sure what is happening with OpenCL right now. In SiSoft Sandra I only see my CPU listed (which is an Intel btw, not AMD), not the GPU. But when I run some of the Stream SDK OpenCL samples, they seem to run much faster than they did on the CPU. Reply

I cannot say thank you enough for posting about these Catalyst 9.12 Hotfix drivers. I might have missed these drivers and have still been stuck in hell until the fixes appeared in the official driver release.

this:
"The desktop mouse cursor becomes enlarged at random while using Windows 7"

has just made my day! I've been battling that issue ever since I got my 5870. Reply

I was one to jump on the bandwagon and got myself a 5870 card a month or so after it was released.

After the news that ATI/AMD would be increasing prices due to problems at TSMC, I was afraid of how big the price bump would be here in Brazil. As it is, I paid the equivalent of $750 for the card. If the prices went up by $50 in the US, prices here in Brazil would be reaching $900 easily, and that was something I wouldn't take.

With the Catalyst 9.11 release back then, and to this day with the 9.12, there are still many issues lurking for me. Most notably, the "giant mouse cursor" problem, and the annoying fact that the computer slows down to a halt if watching certain video types on fullscreen. Drivers haven't fixed my issues yet (nor did BIOS updates to my M3A78 Pro from Asus), and all I have left to do now is wait and hope. Didn't have these many problems with my 4870 before it. =/

Still... when everything works fine, the performance is just awesome. And Dirt 2 looks just fantastic, heh. Reply

Is the giant pointer issue limited to the 5000 series cards? I've got a 4670 in my HTPC running Windows 7 and haven't noticed anything yet, but that may just be due to the fact that I run WMC all the time. Reply